Occluding
(?) Lens: The Turn to Masculinity in Roman Studies

Mark MastersonHamilton College

As
an object of inquiry in the academy, masculinity has become
increasingly important. And as the academy has gone, so has Classics.
This increase in importance has not been without some controversy,
however. My plan here is to discuss briefly some trends outside of
Classics, a little about scholarship within Classics, and then
surrender the mic. This topic is a big one and I cannot even name all
the things I could bring up, much less cast a glance at the history
of these studies inside and outside of Classics. A further note on
the general structure of my remarks-- I will be beginning with the
“negatives” and ending with the “positives.”
In the end, in any case, I am looking to spark some discussion here
about the study of Roman masculinity. A few words, then, about the
study of masculinity outside of Classics--

The study of men has been pursued in ways that have
rightly concerned feminists mightily. We have seen theoretically
naïve Blyesque triumphalism casting feminism as “an”
or “the” enemy. This approach is manifestly unhelpful to
the cause of gender equality, as it seeks to put things back to the
way they used to be1
and it is hardly a compelling mode of academic inquiry anyway. Other
approaches to masculinity have focused obsessively on the ways in
which masculinity is harmful to men (often with liberal helpings of
anti-feminism), making men into the ultimate victims of
masculinity and often of feminism too. Such approaches have
often not focused on the very real benefits that accrue to men from
masculinity and are therefore delusional to varying degrees.2
This second approach of making man the victim of masculinity
comes close to returning (or in fact does return) in analyses that
emphasize the incoherence of masculine identity.3

The move to the study of men and gender (away from a
sole focus on women) has also awakened concern on the grounds that
seeing men as gendered, in thrall to a constructed identity, just as
women are, leads to a situation where less attention is paid to the
fact that there are material and power differentials in serious play.
Calvin Thomas writes that “masculinity studies and the ‘turn
to gender’ [have] thus [been] charged with perpetuating rather
than interrogating the reproduction of male dominance” (2002,
61).4

That gives you some of the minuses that can crop up in
the study of men. I will not discuss the upside (though we can
generate it later in discussion if we like). Instead I want now to
talk about Rome a bit and the downs and ups to studying Roman
manhood.

Toward the end of an important and useful recent
discussion of Roman masculinity,5
Erik Gunderson writes that the accomplished Roman orator, and
thereby the ideal vir, may appear to be calm and in charge but
that this outward appearance conceals a considerably more complex
interior reality. To be an orator is to possess, Gunderson
writes, “an aristocratic, aggressive, masochistic, and
narcissistic mode of being, [a mode of being] filled with pleasure,
shame, and fear, [a mode of being] bought at the expense of both the
orator [himself] and the rest of the world. Uneasy lies the
head that wears a crown.” (Gunderson 2000, 222). Explicitly
relying on Judith Butler’s discussions of gender as
performative and realized over time, Gunderson sees the idealized
Roman masculinity whose details he excavates from rhetorical (and
related) texts of the late republic and early empire, as an anxious
entity riven by interior instabilities. Indeed male subjectivity, on
Gunderson’s reading, looks a lot like a sort of
self-victimization. But, we must remember that Gunderson is aware
that the vir is not the only victim in this hardly victimless
crime-- the rest of the world pays for the vir’s sense
of himself, as Gunderson says. Also, I stress that I do
not mean to pick on Gunderson here--I commend his work to you and I
use it in my own work-- I am rather outlining a dark potential to the
type of analysis he employs. This dark potential can manifest itself
in this way--

In analyzing masculinity as he does, Gunderson fits
nicely into his scholarly cohort, if you will. Masculinity studies
these days continually note that masculinity is in crisis. Anxiety
abounds. As with most things, there is an upside and a downside to
thinking of manhood in this way. Seeing the vir as a victim of
his own self-cultivation (which to be fair to the vir is of
course hardly something he can refuse) raises questions about
respective levels of hurt and harm. Don’t women, slaves, and
barbarians have it worse? Do Cicero, Laelius or Lucian need a hug
from us?

Speaking of modern American masculinity but powerfully
addressing these same questions, Bryce Traister6
poses some hard questions about these types of analyses of
masculinity:

What do we do say to the African American men still
being dragged around behind pick-up trucks driven by white men? To
the gay college student mercilessly beaten unconscious and left to
freeze to death over the course of a cold Wyoming prairie night? To
the women and children hiding in underfunded shelters? I just do not
know whether the vicious masculinity behind these crimes is enduring
a "crisis" in any way comparable to that of their victims,
or if instead we are dealing with a manhood smoothly coherent,
frighteningly competent, and alarmingly tranquil… (Traister
2000, 292-93)

Traister wonders as long as we have masculinity
“competently” embodied (granted that it may be conflicted
or anxious or feeling illegitimate somehow)-- he wonders whether “an
historiography that assumes masculinity as transcendental ‘truth’
is ultimately more problematical than one that implicitly claims that
nobody has or has ever had [masculinity]” (Traister 2000, 293).
An elaboration of masculinity in crisis, thinking about it as a thing
performed anxiously and imperfectly--is this that helpful to know?
Perhaps so; insecurity is a father of aggression, after all.
But, are we, nonetheless, missing something, or not emphasizing what
we should? There is a danger here of announcing a crisis and not
taking it further and even finding the intellectual process of
scholarly elaboration aesthetically pleasing. The discovery of
masculine ego incoherence also has the possibility of supporting the
myopia that sees men merely as the victims of masculinity.

But in the end, to my mind, it is a risk that must be
taken. To do otherwise is to leave masculinity’s naturalizing
ambitions in place. As we proceed we will do well to keep in mind Amy
Richlin’s comments on her objectives for The Garden of
Priapus: “Like feminist scholarship in general, this work
has an explicit agenda. It is activist in that it seeks to change
what it can in our own culture--the college curriculum, the classroom
experience of students, common beliefs about history” (Richlin
1992, xxi).7
To my mind the study of Roman masculinity is an indubitably
worthwhile endeavor as we possibly head into an imperial age. Also,
the discovery of difference in the past (for the Roman vir is,
at least on the surface, not the same as an American guy in any
number of ways) can be liberatory as it suggests that things need not
always be the same for they were different. I am going to stop
here.

1
I think of Robert Bly and the mythopoetic men’s movement here.
See discussion in Messner, Michael A. 1997. Politics of
Masculinities: Men in Movements. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage
Publications. 17-24.

2
For an example, see discussion of the “Men’s Rights
Movement” in Messner, Michael A. 1997. Politics of
Masculinities: Men in Movements. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage
Publications. 41-48. This particular mode (minus overt
anti-feminism) characterizes the rhetoric of Susan Faludi's Stiffed:
The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow and
Company, Inc. [1999]).

3
I commend to the reader Penelope Deutscher's 1997 analysis of the
enabling aspects of the incoherence of identity (Yielding Gender:
Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy. New
York: Routledge). Deutscher’s account suggests quite
convincingly that incoherence of identity helps rather than hinders
masculine dominance.